Stop Thinking Keywords, Think&nbspTopics

The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

We have hired a few new people at Distilled—we're always growing—but as I was explaining the Keyword Planner to our new hires I realized that we are all thinking the wrong way for the future of online marketing.

One of my colleagues, Tom Anthony, has a very scientific way of explaining it: The new query according to Google. He comes to the same conclusion I did: "We need to stop looking at keywords and starting looking at queries." In short, we need to be focusing on what the user is looking for rather than specifically all of the ways they can phrase it.

I am not going to try to convince you of this. We are here. This is the world we live in, so rather than adapting the old way of thinking to the new search order (NSO?), it's time to change our thinking.

What does this really mean to us as practitioners on a day-to-day basis?

We have to stop using the term "keyword" as much as we can. It will never go away, don't get me wrong, but our focus has to change. This means speaking differently, reporting differently, and changing the conversation with our clients about their goals.

You are going to get asked for a keyword research report or a keyword ranking report soon. We as search professionals have provided them in the past, so it's normal for your boss or clients to expect a certain type of data or report. However, with the changes over the last few years, it's time to modify what we report to align better with the data we can get and the data that is best for our goals.

Start by defining your goals

We've said this time and time again: You have to define what you want as a business before you can really get to doing your job in the best way. Your company goals could be:

to be a thought leader in your space

to grow the business

to launch a new product

to increase your company's share of voice in the market

These goals should be set by the company collectively, not just you. Your goals are based off of this. Your goals should be something measurable and impact the company's goals. Let's say that the company wants to grow their business's revenue by 50% next year, website performance can help that with conversions, new visitors, and overall more traffic. Therefore your goals might look like:

Increase overall website traffic by 25%

Increase new visitor percentage from 25% to 40%

Increase conversion rate from the website from 45% to 70%

Notice that keyword ranking and traffic based on keywords are not in here. It's doubtful they ever have been part of your defined goals, but knowing your goals and the company's goals helps change the conversation.

Now, what do you want to accomplish?

Time to start the hard conversations. You should be reporting on your goals from above and what actions you are taking to affect those numbers. At some point your boss or client will ask for a keyword or ranking report. When they do, ask what they want to accomplish with that information. It'll give you more insight into what they are looking for and how best to report that to them.

Most likely it's so they know what your efforts are focused on, and that's understandable.

Start by explaining your goals and how they impact the bigger company goals.

Then, explain the changes to the information that is sent to analytics, and that reporting on the keyword level is next to impossible.

Finally, talk about how you want to stay dedicated to things that can be measured, and provide results to the company's bottom line.

But... we have to RANK!

If they then say that the keyword is the most important thing for you to report on, ask why again. The answer is usually because that's how you tell if your site is ranking for a term, or if your "SEO is working."

Rankings happen for many reasons; the keyword or query is just the initiator of the process. You optimize a page to be the strongest it can be after you've made it the best page for a specific need or topic. There are multiple variations of keywords for any one topic, and therefore your focus should be on the page and the topic, not just one or two of potentially hundreds of keywords.

The two major factors in ranking that you can have an effect on are related to the target page. Having relevant content and strengthening the page are what you should be focused on as a search marketer. Look at the highest correlated factors to ranking from the 2013 Ranking Factors Survey. All of the top factors are page-related.

Your next question should be: If I stop thinking about keywords, how do I know what content to develop to rank?

That depends on the user. We as a profession have really lost sight of talking to the users of our websites. Think about any number of keyword research presentations in the past few years (I've done and seen a number of them) and you'll see that many of them spoke to the Google Keyword Tool's numbers being wrong and getting inspiration in other places, mainly where your target market hangs out.

If you want to know what content to write to "rank" for terms, ask the people who are searching for that topic what they are looking for and write that. This changes how we do research but I think for the better.

Changing reporting

I am going to leave you with how I have started reporting on page level changes and how "SEO is doing." You should again be reporting on the metrics you defined in your goals, but you'll need to replace keyword-specific reports. I'm referring to reports like the number of keywords sending traffic (RIP; that was a favorite of mine), branded vs. non-branded keyword traffic, and ranking reports.

Step 1: Define all search landing pages

This should be all pages on your site technically except those noindexed, but we almost all have an idea of what pages get traffic from search engines. If you are a larger e-commerce site with thousands or millions of pages, you can group these into categories or by page type. Whatever works for you.

Step 2: Prioritize the top landing pages

Remember the terms you always had to report ranking on? What were the pages that needed to rank? Identify those and make a prioritized list just like you would have with keywords.

Step 3: Pull monthly traffic over the last year for those pages

You can automate this of course, but if you have a small number of pages it can be done by hand as well. Traffic is what you want to know about, and you want it to be going up. If traffic goes down to that page, that is your sign that something changed, either the SERPs or demand for that content. Just like if rankings went down, you'd investigate why after seeing that drop.

Step 4: Pull related data per page based on your goals

For the goals we defined above, I'd also report on the percentage of new visitors and conversions. You could report on bounce rate or time on page as well. Below is something that I recently sent to a client (modified to be able to share with a wider audience, of course).

I then investigated the pages that lost traffic and they are on my list to watch next month. This is just how I decided to do it for this client and I am interested to hear how you are having to change your reporting to deal with the changes in our world.

Please share your thoughts below, and have a great week!

About katemorris —

Kate Morris is the Director of SEO for Craftsy. She loves to teach through regular posting and speaking, and has been in the industry for over 13 years.

Agree here with you Kate. Working on this same methodology, even we have started writing content based on user's queries rather than on keywords. We haven't seen good results instantly, but gradually it picked up and we have witnesses decent traffic growth on those pages.

If I have to recommend one tool to find out what queries your users are making to search information, then I would suggest Google Auto-complete. It's free and awesome.

Hi Palash, I think Praveen means when you start typing a search in Google and it gives you suggestions. It's also known as "Google Suggest" or "Google Instant" - lots of names (just to confuse us)! ;-)

Using just Google Suggest (or, as was well commented, Übersuggest) is not enough. A deeper knowledge of how people talk about the topic we target is needed, hence social monitoring and analysis too is of great help for understanding.

But also what our own Matthew Brown would define as Entity Research, which means discovering the connections between the (search) entity we are targeting and others.

Well said, Gianluca. Not a tool per se, but another suggestion: ask the client. I think some people get embarrassed doing this (thinking to themselves: "what if the client thinks we're stupid - i.e. if they think we can't work it out for ourselves") but just discussing the semantic and a few terminologies/possibilities with the client could reveal a gem or two...

A social monitoring tool or social listening tool will be key in this regard. The challenge is that this is still a reactionary strategy. You create the content after the Topic has trended or is trending. The team that will become keen on running a content strategy on organic query predictive modeling will win this game.

It will be a bit like doing SEO in the way the stock market functions. If you catch the title wave of interest early enough, then you get to secure a great profit margin on late comers, given of course that the late comers do not have a more authoritative and more optimized domain/page than yours.

If you are thinking in topics and write enough stellar content you are sure to grab the long tails. It might be necessary to do some research but other than that, if you are doing a good job at this you will be rewarded.

Thinking about topics rather than one keyword has - in my opinion - always been a good idea, even before the demise of keyword data in our analytics tools for two reasons. One is the idea of topic vectors. The other is that each keyword we look to rank for has always behaved like a sub-set of the keyword landscape as a whole.

While a lot of people search for "Nike shoes" there are also people searching for "blue Nike shoes", "new Nike shoes", "buy blue Nike shoes in the UK" etc. So each keyword actually has a frequency distribution of related terms with this big tail off to one side, in exactly the same way that search frequencies in general do. And as with search terms everywhere, if you focus on that head term and don't think about the long tail you're going to be missing easy wins, revenue opportunities, and all sorts of other good things.

If you look at a single keyword, you're also exposing myself to a lot of risk, the same as holding shares in only one company: if their value goes down, you get hurt badly. But if you hold shares in a portfolio of companies - or look at the performance of a whole topic around a keyword - then if things in one company/keyword start to slide your bets are hedged by everything else you hold. So looking at a topic makes it more likely you'll have something good to show in any of your reports than if you look at individual keywords.

This makes (not provided) and indeed the whole idea of looking at topics not keywords a real opportunity: now exec's have to get away from the "But... we have to rank!" mindset that you've wanted to pull them away from for years and and think more like your customers.

And if you focus on landing pages as Kate says and show the exec's in the data all the bad performance they didn't know about before (because they only actually read the keyword page of your report. After all that was the important one, right?) they may even start to get that inbound marketing thing you've been talking about and let you hire that copywriter you've wanted to get your hands on...

Good point about the frequency distribution. Additionally, most searches are conducted in a long-tail format, so it naturally makes more sense to target these, especially when you factor in the ongoing developments in semantic search.

Indeed . That good old 80/20 rule means that only 20%(ish) of the queries in those smaller frequency distributions will be in the head, and 80%(ish) will be in the tail. Ignore 80% of potential customers at your peril!

Hopefully we've all been writing with the user in mind anyway ;-) At the end of the day SEO (and any other form of marketing) is and has always been all about the dollar count, not the visitor count. Writing for the robots might push the visitor count up, but if what you do doesn't push the dollar count up as well then it's not good marketing. At least, that's what your boss's view is likely to be.

So the post-Hummingbird "next big thing" is actually today's big thing as well.

I would add 'be a thought leader within your company.' As a Distilled newbie I have found IMMENSE value in learning from individuals at Distilled and Moz. It is great to see a healthy discussion around topics like this, started by experts like Kate. Also lovely to gather great info from the community here!

In lieu of searching online I can look to my left or right for the best SEO advice. Thanks y'all.

Good to see an SEO plan responding to recent semantic search changes. Are there examples of big companies that have already invested in a topic-based direction? Would be good to dangle these as case studies in front of clients.

The client I used as an example of my reporting is not what you'd consider big and I am under NDA for them. Sadly most of our big clients are the same way, but I'd love to hear from in-house professionals at big brands as to if they have started the transition.

its hard to decide what kind of reporting you should do.
I think you're approach is a good one, but in the end... you might consider KPI's as well.
The KPI's need to be set to inform clients about growth.
You can't grow forever on the same pages or topics - actually, you'll probably never get to that point, but its to make your client aware of the slope.

We realized an increase over 400 percent in the last year for a client in organic traffic.
How? Added content, better optimization etc... but.. they still focus on a specific keyword, yet... again.

So... would love to try this new way of reporting,
but in the real world you might add some conversions/leads to it as well.
It shows your client that traffic is great and rising, but conversion might slowing down.
Means you want to stop focussing on the traffic part.

What i really would love to do?
Stop focussing on reporting those details.
Too many clients want to know what happened in detail - waste of time.
In the end... only thing that matters is (in this following order) 1) traffic 2) conversion 3) leads to sales ratio

Tnx for sharing this.
Would LOVE to know how you guys handle this at Distilled if it comes to the whole funnel & reporting.

Can't agree more about shifting from keyword centric to query centric SEO.

I would add also another reason to this needed change: Hummingbird.

Right now its effects are not directly touching our daily job (if it is done well), but it is clearly telling us that making round our efforts over keywords does not have much sense. Hummingbird, in fact, with it mechanism for understanding relations between words in a query has made very obsolete the classic SEO tactic of creating highly optimized pages for every single set of low hanging fruit keywords, and it is prizing more topically consistent pages, which - even if apparently are not "perfectly" optimized for every single keyword - indeed they are craft for being considered relevant and exhaustive about its topic, also thank to external signals (from backlinks, contextual anchors text, to mentions, to co-occurrences...).

And this is just the beginning of the Hummingbird revolution. As it happened with Caffeine, which radically changed how Google indexes the web, Hummingbird will be followed by in-depth updates that will develop the topic shift (aka: the entity shift) of Google.

I've discussed topic modelling on Moz before (http://moz.com/blog/the-seo-path-to-becoming-a-great-funnel-owner). With Google stripping away keyword data, it makes even more sense to start looking at topics and segmenting by traffic by site sections that map against certain topics.

You make some really good points, Kate. It's really nice to hear an industry leader like Distilled is helping lead the charge for doing better SEO by not being overly obsessed with keyword data… especially because, ya know, we don't really have it anymore. :)

But seriously, your point about getting the client to think deeper about their goals and WHY they want to focus on the keyword-level is key. Personally, I think the best thing you can do in an initial client meeting is helping define KPIs TOGETHER. The business owner has a right to want to define their own KPIs, but at the same time as the expert search marketer it's our job to inform them of where their focus should be.

Google had stopped giving keywords(not provided). In analytic we cannot get keyword but we can view which topic is doing good.So definitely this is how we had to move.

We started looking at topic first and then think about the queries people can have regarding that topic and give direction to our articles accordingly.We have recently started doing this, and results are good.

Vijay, the very nature of long tail keywords is that they cannot be identified. Using all long tail keywords that are from one topic on one page would make for a poor user experience. So no, it's not necessary to optimize the page with long tail keywords.

Thanks for the post.. In addition to autocomplete and ubersuggest, which I just looked at and I like it thanks Jeremy Niedt, I would suggest Google Trends which gives you "related searches" and possibly more useful "Rising searches".

Yes all the content in the post is excellent, But how far does this goes, is it limited to Info sites or publishers or is it related to news sites and forums, and what about the e-commerce sites there you cannot add content but only specifications etc. and reviews but again reviews can be Q&A but still how that can be correlated to the algorithm.

Kate Morris exactly your are explained real time aspects of SEO risk factors solutions really nice. Me too recently think like that but now i share with my coleagues becoz now the expert you too think what i thought i am happy now thanks many for sharing real business requirement for getting more convertion not likes, keyword ranking, back link, etc... :)

Great post, Kate. Just one question about the traffic stats - do you just quote traffic that came from organic search, or do you include all traffic, looking at the bigger picture with social media, PPC, referring sites etc?

Your are exactly explain here future real time SEO depend up on the Conversion & Goals not likes, ranking, backlinks & page rank. Me too thought like this same issue recently before read your info but now i am happy to share this info to my colleagues :)

I completely agree; Google understands the user query far beyond simply the keywords they use. It recognises synonyms and understand context and user intent better than ever so the days of keyword research and targeting being the forefront of SEO are long gone. I believe it's still very important to ensure you're content and targeting is relevant and that you carry out good keyword research to find the best ones to include, but it is much more appropriate to use multiple variations of keywords on pages now rather than repeat your one target phrase over and over.

I love this. I think authenticity means more than just writing with authority and accuracy. We have to deliver content that people actually want to read. I like to think of content as the top product. If I don't make a product people want, there's no amount of spin and "push" that's going to make it work. Thanks for sharing this!!

Keyword is semantical dead-end road. Search engines give less relevance to keywords at least since Schema.org was started. If one marks a page up with Schemaorg's microdata, so the "keyword" property can have only a text value, isn't extendable. But properties like "about" and "mentions", and newly "topic" (not official for now yet, linked to draft's page) can be extended with all available types and properties. So if we think the web semantically, this illustrate the way from strings (keyword) to things (semantically extendable meaning descriptions).

There was a time when link building was just about getting links out there. The many the sites, the better. I remember my friend telling me that they have this daily quota of 150 directories a day, 100 forum posts and blog posts. And their site was always rank on top. Ironic now that the same high ranked site is now being penalized. Guess that's one of the downside of the changing algorithm. A strategy that was good yesterday may be banned as spammy the next day.

We recently have this conversation internally and my bosses recognized that it is going to take time for clients to understand our new reports templates. But there is something we should all think about: in the past it was much more easier to SEOs to sell/set up a strategy because keywords are obviously easy to present. When it comes to analyze user intent it's become less obvious and sometimes the client has a better understanding of the audience than the agency for example.

So we should certainly work a lot on which content the target is looking for by building list of websites that serve the same content or a complementary. For example if you work in the fashion industry you should look at your direct competitors, social media (twitter feeds), forums and Q&A websites etc. Monitor them on a monthly basis and then identify areas that are relevant for your business. That way rather than add new concepts/keywords in the page you will start to add features such as : stores addresses, phone number, bigger images, a picture of someone of your team, size guide, etc

Finally because it's not obvious to understand user intent, you should run a classic marketing study or a survey. All these may seems difficult but think about this : How many questions come to your head before buying a product online? Understand user intent is not obvious but we can reach tremendous goal by assuming that we don't know what the user wants; hence we tests assumptions.

I totally agree with you. After Google released Hummingbird, a lot of changes happened in the search engine. Keywords seem to be less significant in SEO. Marketing and SEO needs to tie up some more to be more effective. The SEO evolution is so fast and anyone who doesn’t manage to follow the current will definitely fail.

It's great advice in this post and deserves wide recognition, however if you look at ten reports from ten different agencies or SEO specialists they all prioritise their own set of values based on what their particular clients expect to see in a report. Some of it is based on familiarity, some of it is based on what an authority has blogged as the three essential KPI's for business.

What this all comes down to is the big 'G' (no not GOD, the other one) deciding what joe public really meant when they typed four keywords into the search box. 18 months ago Google told us to concentrate on Questions rather than keywords but we didn't really see any noticable changes in serps, page rank, traffic or other statistics that matter to us. But the rollout takes time to impact and 2014 will see us looking closely at Autocomplete, Google Suggest or Google Instant (take your pick) and the influence and our level of understanding (or not as the case maybe) of Hummingbird - which will become ummm-ingbird to clients on the phone unless we all have a clear understanding of the semantics, intergration,linguistics, syntax, etymology, communication, semiotics and G's knowledge graph. If the search is not clearly keyworded in a question then ambiguities or misrepresentations could be evident.

When it comes to search organic or otherwise we only need to find the answer to one question, "what is the searchers intent?".

This makes perfect sense. Great article. Now we just need to make the entire market understand that going from straight keyword tracking to this more "evolved way of tracking". But I suspect it will take some time. Keep up the good work.

Kate....thanks for the informative articles. I am wondering if there are any specifics for consulting firms to optimize business listings. I am a healthcare consultant. Together with affiliates, we are developing a new website.

Thanks for your blog. I recently published my online dating site and I am not SEO expert but I was exactly thinking same thing to get better rank on serp. Good job I seen your post and proves that I am on the right track :)

That is true that we have to think topics instead of focusing on keywords, however I think a post on a topic within a keywords are important since we still need to make use of keywords within the posts in order to tell google what this page is about, however you have provided good article...

Over all its a very useful and interesting post to follow..
And also long tail keywords are the parts of this technique.

Keywords are really hard to balance. You have to work on so many choices if you are planning to center your SEO plans for it. However, if you let it flow as natural as possible, people will come into you and get it going.

Hi Kate! Thanks for share a great post regarding Keyword vs. topics, I think it’s changing due to semantic search rules, I always think about conversion rate from the keyword and topics.... is this a right way?

We have started the shift to semantic and LSI search over keyword/keyphrase search lately. I actually did a company-wide presentation on it a couple weeks ago. I have shared this article to further back up and promote the direction I'm hoping we go. I agree - it's not about the word, it's about intent, the topic & what the user wants to find.

The way I defined it in my presentation was simple: the user is looking for a site. They don't know what site that is but that site has exactly what they want to know, buy or see. Google's job is to find THAT site and return it #1. Figure out what the answer, product or result is and you know how to build it to suit.

Thanks for the insightful article Kate. I really wondered what I should measure. Which report I create for ranking. After the Google's update on search query now search term has been changed and now we need to focus on long tail instead of single or couple of keywords. Surly defining goals are trendy and informative idea. The newly change report can make a great impact and its quite imperative for measuring companies goal. Really appreciable guide.

Kate, thanks for the post to get majority of the SEO community thinking. I, for one, am still working to adapt with the "Topic" level approach vs "Keyword" level strategy. In our experience, clients, especially small business owners have a hard enough time understanding internet marketing and SEO as a whole, so our challenge is to get them to know understand how to utilize goals outside of keyword rankings. Don't get me wrong, we are still going to provide keyword ranking reports as rankings are still considered a KPI. Aside from using Ubersuggest and Google Auto-complete, what do you or anyone else reading this comment recommend for us SEOs who deal predominantly with very small businesses with 1 location in 1 city in order to help educate them on the "Topical" approach? I emphasize on small businesses because we're not all trying to rank for national, regional or statewide keywords or topics for that matter due to much lower budgets. - Patrick

I can't deny that I have the same problem, especially with small businesses.

But making them understanding was easier than I imagined.

Let say your client is a small pizzas chain with more than one place in New York.

Once you would be discussing about ranking for "Pizzas in New York" for the home page, "Pizzas in SOHO", "pizzas in NOLITA", "pizzas in Tribeca", etc. etc. for the internal pizzerias pages... and create optimized pages just for those keywords.

Now... let's think about the entities we have for a site like that:

Pizza > Organic Food > all the ingredients related to a Pizza (if the chain is intelligent, they also sell Pizza with Nutella...);

New York and all its neighborhoods > which leads to the people living in them

Search Entities related to common questions like (and remember that many of them are also location sensitive, therefore a mobile strategy is essential):

How

When

What

Why

How much

How many

And I could go on.

Creating a website around those topic, making of a restaurant page not just a page with the map, address and a SEO optimized text (i.e.: "Our pizzeria in Tribeca is open 24th. If you are in Tribeca,come and enjoy our 1000 different kind of pizza whenever you want in our pizzeria!" sigh), but a hub with snippet of internal in-depth pages about Tribeca and its events (hey! there's a movie festival), about the pizzaioli and the people attending the pizzeria on a regular basis, about the most its sold kind of pizza and so on, then you are creating a page which is not only more topically relevant for Google for "Pizzeria in Tribeca" (and all the stemmed related "keywords"), but also far more useful for the users.

If you explain all this to your client, involving him (who better know those Entities his business is all about better than him?), then you will see how not only he won't you stress you too much on keywords' ranking (he will still do it, from time to time), but he will be more keen to accept a more holistic and inbound marketing vision for his website.

Good stuff Kate. I think your title says it all. SEO's should be thinking more topically rather than focusing on ranking for a very select handful of specific keywords. I think this will challenge webmasters to create better content for users rather than figuring out how to get your page to rank for a specific keyword.

Thank you Kate for putting it so clearly and so many of us who have small businesses and web sites in niches are trying to wrap our arms around semantic search and get off the keyword bandwagon...being the most knowledgeable on page about a topic is truly the best goal right now...

"we need to be focusing on what the user is looking for rather than specifically all of the ways they can phrase it."

Great point. The idea and the theme and the intent behind the search are what matter the most now. Especially with Hummingbird in place exact match phrases aren't as critical to success as they once were.

Great Post Kate; I have stopped thinging on keywords and my main focus is on increasing search or all traffic and obviously Revenue.

And I report my client on matrics such as; All Traffic, Unique Traffic, Visitor duration, Bounce Rate, New Visits. Also on landing pages as you define and also mentions direct, refferal or search traffic too as compair to previous Month.

And my client is very happy with this report . Atleast he don't have to watch his keywords go up or down every month. :)

I knew Ask Jeeves had the right idea! great post Kate, putting queries before keywords is definitely the way forward. I think you are likely to get a better conversion rate as well, even if the the traffic is lower, because you are reaching out to real people and answering their questions directly.

This is a great post. Seems like a lot of other posts I've been reading, reporting to help with the not provided.

However I'm not sure you really explained how to look a "topics" vs. "keywords". So are you researching topics instead of keywords? Example to "How to purchase electric razor" vs. "electric razor". If yes what's the methodology?

Seems the direction keyword research must go per the new Hummingbird algo.

"If you want to know what content to write to "rank" for terms, ask the people who are searching for that topic what they are looking for and write that. This changes how we do research but I think for the better."

The key to identifying topics (in your case the topic is electric razor, but there could be tons of search terms around that topic) is to understand what your users are looking for. If you sell men's shaving items, you can look at internal site search, quora, forums, Amazon reviews, blog posts on men's shaving needs, user surveys, and customer service information to glean what topics people are interested in.

yes you are right Kate. I was working on this from last few months and i can see the improvement in traffic. Here is the prove..Today i was analyzing that i am getting traffic from google on keywords like this "which one is better for business? twitter or instagram".. and surprisingly i read your article after that.. Hence proved

Kudos for bringing this subject up Kate. It seems as though people tend to ignore this and continue focusing on keywords. Out of my own experience, I've noticed more and more content ranking high when thinking more in terms of topic modelling than keywords alone.

And i am sure that everyone's aware abut the fact that Hummingbird is paying more attention to each word in a query now, ensuring that the whole query (the whole sentence or conversation or meaning) is taken into account, rather than particular words.

Nice post Kate, But i have a confusion what if user searches "Web Design" in Google is bcz of hummingbird Google will show results Titled "Where to find web design company" ? If not then how to rank for it? Sorry may be I'm not 100% familiar with humming bird but thought of asking.

What we are doing is writing blog posts on user queries and interlinking commercial pages with exact keywords which i want to rank for.

And that's the way we all should create content. Hummingbird is on, so everyone should change seo strategy. I see it writing from time to time about google penalty articles (case study or else) and I see increasing number of visitor coming from nowhere (I don't know what they're typing in searchox - thanks Google for not provided:). Google autocomplete? Good tool since laziness of users is well known and they click it because is given than write their own query.

Great post, and well timed for me. We're actually in the process of altering our Keyword Analysis for clients to focus less on keywords and more on visitor profiles and potential queries for those visitors. The caveat being that keyword analysis is an ongoing process that constantly needs to be incorporated into content, tracked and then revisited. Some clients are under the impression that ranking is the only metric that proves the success of an SEO campaign. In some cases, the perception of the importance of rank overrides a definitive surge in traffic. It's the old saying: What good is being number one on Google for X query if it isn't bringing you any more business?

My question to you: Do you end up having custom reports, as in completely different reports for every client? Not every client gets excited about the same data; are you still focusing on ranking reports for some, and then goal-oriented traffic metrics for others?

I do end up creating different reports for different clients. There is some that can be automated but every company has different needs. I do not focus on ranking reports but will talk about a top ranking if it's been proven over a period of at least a month and there is improved traffic to the target page to back it up.

Very nice work Kate Morris ! i think you have to prove our topic as well bocz most of people 1st strategy to get our goals to set perfect keywords they never know the value of content and especially selecting some good topic as well. So relay inspiring to read this topic and agreed with you.

Very useful post Kate, we are currently rebuilding our website and at the same time considering the content for the new pages. This post has given me some excellent food for thought about our approach, thank you

The problem with rankings is that it is the easiest for clients to understand and that is usually what gets sold. The expectation is usually set somewhat higher than that, but it's an underlying understanding that the traffic will convert.

Completely agree with you Kate, this is also how you can be safe from humming bird and target the real audience. To get the topical suggestions from different geographies one can use ubersuggest.org great tool if you need to server a client outside your geography.

It means clearly is that, do not focus on keywords rather try to help the users , make your plan , What the users having the problem ? then try to solve those problems . That asks the strategies ,so go with the strategies then Google automatically will reward you in my point of view.Your idea is very nice in today SEOs.

You said it and for sure it will bode well! No matter what goes on but you have to make a believe in that Google has forgotten everything and started looking what the user wants! In order to get back in marketing we must focus on user experience (UX) though! People nowadays talk about Sales and Money and Revenue but I think they just don't know how to accomplish this! In order to gain something you have to give something so stop thinking about Keywords anymore and think something better and beyond. Take Care!

Great post, however there is a step missing in there. Thinking about company goals is always a great first step, but there needs to be a part in between company goals and topic generation where you need to do audience research. I think its easy for us to forget that behind every keyword is a person with a unique life situation that is driving them to type in that query.

When we understand the person behind the query and why they have that particular problem then we can generate topics that would answer their query.

Great post. We've been talking/debating about this direction for some time and it's great to see someone else's opinions. My only thoughts on the post are on step 3 (monthly traffic):

- wouldn't you likely want to be looking at Organic Search traffic specifically for those pages?

- Ideally, you'd be comparing not just month over month but month over previous year's month data for that month. We see a majority of our clients with significant seasonality, so in our case if we only looked at consecutive month data we'd be elated (or dismayed) on a regular basis for no reason other than the seasonal traffic factor.

Of course, since the entire search engine of google has changed (leaving some important ranking signals) to handle the semantic search, so the very fist step while starting any SEO campaign must be changed accordingly. Now all the search marketers should also think about the intentions of the visitors and accordingly plan for the suitable content and then the appropriate words to best describe those contents. Now the keywords do not exists anymore.

thank you for sharing your knowledge on this subject. You made very clear points. I like, "Your goals should be something measurable and impact the company's goals." Key being measurable so that action can be taken for improvement if needed.